A Sport of Nature (15 page)

—What about?— He knew she naturally assumed that the kind of school community he was privileged to live in must provide an ease of communication with the young man she herself could not have. She wouldn't say it, but he wouldn't let her off. —I live with black boys all the time, I've got nothing particular in common with Alpheus.—

Neither he nor Hillela had been in the garage since it had become a family home. Frilly curtains on a sagging wire, smell of burned cooking and the sweetish cloy of confined human occupation, a hi-fi installation hanging the festoons of luxury over napkins, bed and cooker—its existence became real around their presence as strangers; bringing a sense of this not only here, but in the house across the yard where they had moved in from night streets.

Alpheus was a soft-voiced helper as he and Sasha dismantled a single electrical outlet whose plastic had melted and melded
with the overload of plugs connected through an adaptor. —You need a separate outlet now that you have a hi-fi as well. They'll have to get an electrician to install another lead from the main.— Alpheus took the advice as if it were something he could follow in the practical course of things. But both knew he had bought what he did not want his benefactors to know about, because he had no business spending money on such things as hi-fi equipment, any more than he should have burdened himself with a family. Alpheus's girl hanging about in the background acknowledged Hillela with the same gazing politeness—gone completely still, as if in the children's game where the leader turns suddenly to confront those moving up secretly behind him—that she had had when the white girl, carrying torn-up letters, had come upon her carrying her pregnant belly in the yard. The girl was wearing one of Carole's favourite dresses Hillela now realized she had not seen for some time; she had worn it herself, she and Carole often exchanged clothes. There was something else whose disappearance she had not noticed. In the little home where the functions of all rooms were reduced to fit into one, there were no ornaments except a few plastic toys and, on a straw mat on the hi-fi player, the undamaged Imari cat.

In many ways it was more than the distance of a back yard from the house to Alpheus's garage. It was the only outing they took, that Saturday. Hillela did not use the telephone. This was a day before them, all around them, untouched either at beginning or end by the week that preceded it or the week that would follow when on Sunday night, familiarity, a family would return. The luxury of its wholeness extended the ordinary course of a day, measured time differently, as Hillela's breath had measured it in the night. The cat followed and stayed with them everywhere, perhaps only because they did not know it was accustomed to getting trimmings from Bettie. It kneaded Sasha's thighs and Hillela kissed one by one the four sneakers of
white fur for which it had got its name, Tackie. What they took for affection, weaving them into its caresses, was only greed. They themselves did not touch. There were several chess lessons that ended in laughter, they even quarrelled a little; it was impossible to have Hillela to oneself, at one's mercy, without frustration at her lack of adolescent apprehension, envy of her—what? Adults begin to predicate from the time children are very small. What do you want to be when you grow up? What are you going to do when you leave school? What career are you interested in? This predication was not an answer to anything about life it was needed to know. These questions, formulae put absently by men and women preoccupied by financial takeovers, property speculation, divorces, political manoeuvres, Sasha knew were lies. From the beginning: —They knew you were never going to be an engine driver … not if they could help it. They despise engine drivers. They know it's not what you want to
be
, it's what they've already decided you'll settle for, so they can say
they've
done all they could for you.—

—You should do whatever you want to do.—

—Can't you understand?—

—You wrangle away at it too much. You'll get hungry, you'll have to eat; you'll have to work.—

—I don't understand you. You're the one who's had a lousy time, you've been pushed around as it suited them, and you—I don't know … you seem to feel free. No-one's less free than you! What's going to happen when you leave school next year? Are they going to pass the hat round to send you to university?—

—Now don't be unfair, you know they would.—

—Or are they thinking that for you it's a secretarial course and a useful job through influence at the Institute of Race Relations, and someone will pay for a degree by correspondence, on the cheap, like for Alpheus.—

—Well, maybe I'll go to Rhodesia.—

—You've just thought of that for something to say, this minute.—

She laughed; they were eating apples and the juice trickled down her chin.

—Maybe I'll get a job.—

—What job?—

—Oh journalism, or maybe nursing.—

—For pete's sake! The difference is … tremendous, total. You'd think it was choosing between chocolate or vanilla. When do you suppose you'll decide?—

—Then. I'll say, then. Nursing; newspaper.—

—Hilly, Rhodesia's a horrible place, there's going to be a war there.—

—Len never says anything.—

—When he writes you a birthday card, no.—

With regular bites, she was shaping a spool out of the apple core.

—Sasha … Why d'you let everything make you so angry. Sasha …—

He felt a fresh surge of what she called anger. —Because you forgive them.—

The castaway raft that was carrying the day dropped out of rapids into quiet water. She played the guitar to herself, bent over cradling it to save him from disturbance. Out of his week's pay at the liquor store he had bought himself some books, and had begun one this weekend.
The Brothers Karamazov
was in the house in the old red hardback uniform edition of Dostoevsky along with all the other books under whose influence he had been reared without knowing it or having read them, but he had bought the paperback as if the other had not been there all his life, on one of the shelves that narrowed every passage as well as stretched up the walls in every room, and made the odours he associated with home compound with the smell of paper and the livingroom fruit
bowl. He wanted to read the book because he had heard one of the masters at school mention, in a debate on capital punishment (the school tried hard to introduce issues that schoolboys could not be expected to think about), that the writer Dostoevsky had stood before a firing squad and found himself suddenly reprieved instead of dead. The extremity of this experience attracted Sasha, who sometimes was secretly drawn to the possibility of committing suicide. One of the reasons for the anger which Hillela had gently mocked was that he felt his mother had wormed this secret out of him—not in words, but in the concentration of signs only she and he could read: the way he left a room, the shift in his attention when someone was speaking—he could not stop her adding these things up. But he was safe from that secret now. Hillela was there. It was not possible to think of nonexistence while she was close by, her bare foot with the one funny toe stretched towards the afternoon fire they had made for themselves.

He was disappointed with the visit to the holy Zossima (rationalism was one of the influences he was unaware of; religious mysticism bored him) until Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov embarrassed his sons by making a ridiculous scene, but after that the new reader entered the novel as millions had done before him, although to him it seemed its knowledge of all he needed to know, that nobody would ever tell him—even though everything was discussed, talk never stopped—was part of the possession of the house boarded this silent weekend when it was lit-up and empty. As he read his absorption deepened like the stages of sleep; and he was aware of his companion only the way the cat, actually asleep, showed awareness of the comfort of human presence and the fire's warmth by now and then flexing thorns through the white fur of a paw. Then he fell into a passage that seemed to surround and isolate him. ‘I am that insect, brother, and it is said of me specially. All we Karamazovs are such insects, and, angel as you are, that insect lives in you, too, and will stir up a tempest in
your blood. Tempests, because sensual lust is a tempest! Beauty is a terrible and awful thing! It is terrible because it has not been fathomed and never can be fathomed, for God sets us nothing but riddles. Here the boundaries meet and all contradictions exist side by side. I am not a cultivated man, brother, but I've thought a lot about this. It's terrible what mysteries there are!'

He did not know Hillela had stopped playing her guitar; he had not been listening. She wandered out of the room, and that she was not there any longer he felt immediately. He thought he heard her calling. Some other sound, the susurrus of the shower; perhaps he imagined the voice, like the voices heard under a waterfall. He went to the bathroom door and rapped a mock drum-roll. She did call something. He rapped again. Hillela opened the door, pink paths showing all over her drenched head, streams of water licking her breasts, the springy stamens of her pubic hair brilliant with shaking drops. A hollow of pale mauve shadow went from each lean hip-bone down to the groin. —I boiled myself by the fire.— He looked at her. Not at her face; and she was watching him, both encouraging and anxious, a kind of happiness. He kissed the breasts, letting them wet his face. He knelt down and pressed closed eyes and mouth against that wet moss that poor boys at school had tried to represent in ugly drawings in the lavatories. She reached for a sponge and squeezed it over his head. The water ran down his hair and plastered it. She teased: —Just like an old mango pip.— They played, through the open door the house was filled with shouts and laughter. The shower was still plashing. They fought and slithered in the steam. She pulled him under the fall of water and he struggled out of his wet clothes and imprisoned her, cool and ungraspable. The water found the meeting of their bellies and poured down their thighs. She la-la-la-ed, he pushed her head under the full force of the jet.

They dried their hair by the fire. He towelled hers vigorously, but her resistance was weak and laughing, the game was running
down; the smell of Hillela's hair was identifiable as the source of the intimations of her he had found, over several years now, in her jacket that hung in the jumble behind a door, or on a cushion on the old sofa, in a jersey left inside-out, as it had been pulled off, sleeves holding the shape of her impatient push up to elbows.

Hunger was also a happiness. He cooked up a rich red-and-yellow mess of tinned tomatoes and mushrooms, tuna fish and cheese, an expert in clandestine boarding-school cuisine. They carried it to the fire and camped on the floor. The cat filched bits of fish with the club of a curved paw and spat out each morsel several times to get rid of the tomato coating. Sasha put her through the window, Hillela let her in again. Sasha suggested he would take another bottle of wine but neither wanted it. The telephone rang; Hillela was sopping up sauce with a piece of bread, he put down his plate, she waved the crust, and he did not know whether it was a signal that he should answer. She cleaned her plate with conscientious gusto, making figures of eight while he counted the rings, nine, ten, eleven, and the last cut off in the middle. Within such content so many things seem possible, even easy. —All you need is enough for a cheap one-way ticket. If you can get that together, then you can work your way round Europe. There must be people we know we could stay with … connections.—

—Billie—she's got family in London. You know—my step-mother.—

—I want to keep away from youth hostels. I've had enough of living in dormitories. They say in France, if you go to the South where so many rich people are, you can get taken on as crew for a yacht. Girls too. There's someone at school, his brother went all the way to the Bahamas—fantastic. The trouble is, we'll finish school in the December of next year—

—November.—

—Same thing; it's winter in Europe. But we could work in ski resorts for a bit.—

Hillela mimed a shiver.

—No, you'll love it. The way you can dance, I'll bet you'll ski well. Good co-ordination.—

—Cold places.— A fearful intake of breath.

—That's because it's something you can't even imagine. The sun is hot, the snow is cold—it's like eating sorbet and drinking hot black coffee.—

She smiled praisingly. —How do you know.—

He caught her hand, patted himself on the head with it. —I know, I just know.—

—And Carole could join up with us somewhere.—

—Carole?—

He stared at her. She looked back with the face of someone practical, considering ways and means.

—But she'll still be at school.—

—In the holidays. It'll be fun. The three of us. Like here.—

Orange and blue liquid pulsed in the coals; measured perhaps a minute. He picked up his book again, and, as the cat would look about fastidiously for a place to lie, slowly settled his head in her lap, where the plate had been. She grabbed a cushion, lifted his head, and put the cushion beneath it. He had been reading, on and off, all day. She looked to see how far along he was by now: more than two hundred pages.

—What about the bathroom.—

Only the pilot light of his conscious attention burned. —There's all day tomorrow.—

She began to read over his head; when he got to the end of a page before her, her hand went down to hold him back. As she caught up with the sense of the narrative their pace drew even, so that they were reading at the same instant the same passage; ‘I want you to know me. And then to say goodbye. I believe it's always best to get to know people just before leaving them.'

Sasha closed the book and put it aside without marking his place with the torn bus ticket he used, but the spine of the paperback, bent as far as he had read, lifted the pages apart from the rest at that point. After a while her hand stirred as if about to touch his hair, but did not. She bent over, smiling, but his eyes were closed.